Wednesday, 30 March 2011

In what ways does your media product use/develop or challenge forms and conventions?

Layout

Before starting my main task of creating a newspaper; I had to conduct some research of other newspapers; like the Bromley Times and The Metro and identify often-used conventions. I established that most papers use a five-column layout for their text making use of the space within a page. However not all papers followed this convention. (Example) For my newspaper I adopted this convention, however I tried my best to avoid making the articles to long-winded or boring. Although I tried to make the articles short and interesting I had to come to a compromise when I made a draft print out and realized that I just didn’t’t have enough text in my articles leaving me with a lot of blank spaces.

Measurement

For a newspaper to look the part, I appreciate that there needs to be a uniform set of measurements so everything fits into perspective. The alignment of columns, advertisements, masthead etc is important to keep the page neat and clearly orientated. For this reason I took numerous measurements from the metro newspaper like the; column width, gutter space and masthead width and length and entered them into the Mac program Indesign. By doing this I was able to give my newspaper a professional look.

Design

All of the adverts and other graphical images like the masthead and plugs where created with the measurements I took from the metro newspaper, at first I did not like the idea of using the measurementsfrom another paper to construct my own; but in time I realized that doing so gave me a basic guideline to creating a professional looking newspaper. On top of this, I now appreciate how important it is to do thing a particular way so my media product could be identified as a newspaper and not mistaken for a magazine. With the design of my masthead I set out to make a logo which described my target market,graphically……My paper is called “ The Bromley Bite”, for the font of“The” I used a polished joined handwriting styled font which I used to represent an articulate and critical reader; someone who reads an article and forms their own opinion rather than swallowing the ideas of the reporter. For “Bite” I used a basic block type font with rounded edges, personally this represents a neutral stand point however someone else could take a different meaning from it. And for “Bromley” I used a graffiti type font which I saw to represent an urban reader who is not restricted by a stereotype and wants to know what is going on in their area. Moving on to the colours I used thought the paper, I decided to use a bright pink and Light blue colour scheme. Using these colours I was trying to state that my paper was aimed at both males and females by relying on the stereotype that girls like pink and boys like blue. Although it is rather cliché I was hoping that by playing on this would make my intentions clear, however I do accept that the type of articles I produced may not appeal to much to a female audience.

How effective is the combination of my main product and the other ancillary tasks?

Firstly, my newspaper, radio advertisement and poster were created with a youthful target market in mind. However I accept that they media products do not represent this group. Before constructing each text I had to do some research and identify what worked and how I would tailor my product to fit with successful conventions.

Poster

Using Google images I found a number of newspaper posters whichpromoted and advertised the newspaper, I established that posters for papers such as; the Metro and the Guardian making use of vibrant colours did well to capture the attention of a passer by. More oftenthan not the poster had a creative twist which promoted the brand of the paper and was filled with imagery of the papers livery and colours. Upon reflection I accept that my poster did not do either of these things enough to make a memorable impression on anybody who looked at it. The idea I had was far from creative and had to many blank spaces, I simply created a print screen of my front page and entered some text around the image. The branding was only evident on the masthead which was scaled down on the print screen of the paper; lacking the flair of a production which had to appeal to young people.

Radio Advert

Before I started any planning work I visited rab.com and listened to some of the best radio ads of all time; to get an idea of what worked well in a radio advertisement. From this I learned that witty yet simple ideas often madecommunication between the institution ( the newspaper owner/ editor/ me) and the audience a lot more efficient. I gathered that once people felt engaged by the ad they would take away a lot more from it then they would the average advertisement. Although I was armed with this knowledge I failed to reflect it through my work. The script was poor and read like a news round, rather than catering to the young I did the complete opposite and produced an advertisement that suited a daytime advertisement slot; when my target audience would be in school.

Newspaper

Out of all of my tasks, I believe the newspaper was the most successful, possibly because I spent more time on it than I did the other task but either way it was a clearerexample of the type of product I wanted to produce for a young target audience between the ages of 16 to 21. I made use of the space I had on the page by filling the gaps with adverts for driving lessons, restaurants, album releases etc.

In conclusion two out of the three task where rather weak and did little to support the main task; the newspaper. However I believe that structure of all of the tasks was decent but lacked a defined target audience. Although I knew whom I was catering to, I failed to reflect this through the poster and the radio advertisement.

Above is a advert design for the RED Driving school. I thought this advert was fitting in consideration of my target market. I got an image of the RED logo from Google images and used a basic text from Photoshop to construct this coupon

The ASOS advert just above the Main headline was also inspired by my target market, besides music, sport and current affairs my newspaper also incorporates fashion into the full product, for this reason a advertisement of this orientation seemed fitting. To construct this advertisement I visited the ASOS website and selected a variety of products and then compiled these on photoshop by cut and pasting them into the same canvas. after doing this I then free-transformed the images and scaled them down to the same size.

Sunday, 27 March 2011

The following slide share presentation is evidence of my newspaper feedback, I printed out the front and inside page of my paper and gave my classmates green and orange post-it notes and asked them to write out a comment and stick it to the paper. Green post-its represented a good comment and orange post-its were used to represent the flaws of the paper.

Saturday, 26 March 2011

Above is the feedback that was gathered from the social networking site, Facebook. I used the website to post my work and make it public; this allowed me to gain feedback from my peers and establish an unbiased view of any improvements i could make to the newspaper. I think that posting my work in a public domain was extremely beneficial because it opened my eyes and revealed what my target market would react too.

Friday, 25 March 2011

The following pictures where taken by me for the use of soft news story in my newspaper. In these pictures I wanted to encapsulate the image of my readers.In this picture I think I framed the shot well producing a clear and crisp image however, the camera case and rubbish bin spoiled the shot somewhatThis picture was similar however I think this image was sharper and higher in clarity. For this reason I will use this image for my article.

The remaining images where decent, however I dont think they were suitable enough for the use of my article, there was not enough going on in these shots and felt quite plain to me; as previously mentioned because I'm targeting youth I want to incorperate images which encapsulated movment. For this reason I going to take more pictures to accompany the story

After much deliberation i decided to put a movie review up as a filling plug, i took an image from the internet and resized it and placed text around it. After i knew what wanted to produce for the space it made the task much easier.

So far this is all i have done on my front page, I inserted the masthead i desgined and i placed text labbleing where i want to put the date, cost etc. at the momnet im finding Indesign hard but i know that with more practise i cant master this program and achieve a good grade from my production.

As a part of my ancillary task of creating a poster to advertise my newspaper, I decided to conduct a little research.

This involved looking at several posters for newspapers and identifying the conventions of them. So far the posters have come across are quite witty and creative. And very colourful.

Besides this, i have noticed that the papers logo/ colors or livery are always very prminant in the advertisment, i belive that doing this is important so the newspaper can be recognized on a shelf and succesfully linked with an advertisment on a billboard

Sunday, 6 March 2011

Above is the first design I made for an advertisement which I placed at the foot of my front page, I took an image of the Xbox from Google images and then resized it in Photoshop. However after placing the image in the desired place; I realized that it was too large for the space. I took the psd file back to Photoshop and began to resize it.

Now we can see how the image has been resized in dimensions to fit the required space. In the program in design, I measured the length and width of the space I had allocated for the footer advertisement and entered these dimensions into Photoshop. By doing this it gave me a better perspective of how to place my text and images. After resizing I decided that making a change to the font would make the advert standout. I placed an inner glow effect on the most important details of the advert so they would stand out to a reader and be identifiable as important information.

Saturday, 5 March 2011

Besides generating my own stories, I also designed the advertisements used throughout the paper, to do this I used the photo editing software; photoshop. I took the newspaper measurements I used to design the template of my paper and entered them into photoshop in order to gain maximum resolution for the advertisements.